Bodily Comportment Research Articles

A criticism of Young’s ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ through Scheler’s understanding of motor action

This paper is concerned with the nature of feminine bodily comportment described by Iris Marion Young in ‘Throwing Like a Girl.’ According to Young, the style of movement of women, who undergo patriarchal oppression, reveals their existential status as a socio-historically oppressed group. Her claim is that patriarchal oppression acts upon women’s bodily functions, thus causing feminine motility to exhibit an inhibited intentionality, an ambiguous transcendence and a discontinuous unity. In this paper I take issue with these three modalities of feminine comportment. Firstly, I resort to Max Scheler’s phenomenological description of the different stages leading to motor action to show that the bodily functionality of oppressed women is intact when considered from the motor-intentional perspective. Secondly, I advocate, via Scheler’s phenomenology, a different mode through which to interpret the bodily expressivity of oppressed women. My claim is that feminine motility expresses the negative impact that sexism has upon the oppressed women’s emotional pre-theoretical and pre-non-motor level. My (Schelerian) thesis is that patriarchal society negatively influences, and thereby compromises, the constitution of women’s axiological apparatus by inhibiting their preferences of values. Finally, I argue that the axiological apparatus of oppressive men is likewise compromised, and hence needs to be re-educated as much as that of the oppressed women. The main aim of this paper is to suggest a correct reading of the hampered motility of oppressed women, which keeps into consideration the phenomenon of ‘oppression’ in its entirety, and which can thus lead to adequate axiological therapies.

Ethnographic spectacle and trans-Atlantic performance: Unravelling the costumes of vaudeville’s ‘Queen’, Eva Tanguay

Eva Tanguay (1878–1947), although little known today, was one of the most famous and wealthy actresses in America in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Tanguay’s vaudeville success was built on her playing a wild, racialized, highly sexed, financially and socially emancipated woman, who was nonetheless affectionate and warm. Scholarship to date has considered how Tanguay used the offensive stereotype of the ‘Coon’ associated with African Americans to achieve her huge commercial success, but less attention has been paid to how she used the symbolism and materiality of her costumes in conjunction with her racialized appearance and comportment to achieve her stardom. This article, therefore, examines how Tanguay expressed her ‘wild’ persona using costumes and comportment that blended established stereotypes that her audiences associated with the era’s dime museums, natural history museums, circuses, ethnographic expositions, human zoos and the conventions of minstrelsy. This article also reveals that Tanguay’s costumes and comportment were greatly influenced by a popular French performance style, the chanteuse èpileptique. This genre indicated the importance of a bodily comportment which animated costumes that was a highly popular sexualized and racialized performance style associated with cancan dancers that came from France’s experiences of ethnographic entertainment. This article thus traces how, as Tanguay’s star rose, her performance style increasingly blended trans-Atlantic conventions in costume and comportment to craft a wild persona that expressed the era’s tensions around changing gender roles, immigration and race in America.

Over-MakingNyanga: Mastering “Natural” Beauty and Disciplining Excessive Bodily Practices In Metropolitan Cameroon

Abstract:This study examines how Anglophone urban elites in 1960s metropolitan Cameroon negotiated local and global ideas about culturally constructed forms of “natural” black beauty. Formally-educated Christian urbanites, such as freelance female journalists, who often worked as civil servants, sought to discipline women’s bodily practices and emotional expressivity in order to regulate the boundaries of perceived feminine respectability and to define a woman’s “natural” beauty, a descriptor with both internal and external implications. The language they used included both local terms such asnyanga, a Cameroonian Pidgin English word for varied ideas about beauty and stylishness, and standard English terms. This specific use of language illustrates the hybridity of understandings of natural beauty and bodily comportment, painting a distinct African imagery denoting the social progression of black Cameroonian elite subcultures.

Admiration, attraction and the aesthetics of exemplarity

ABSTRACTThe aim of this article is to show that an aesthetics of exemplarity could be a useful component of projects of moral self-cultivation. Using Linda Zagzebski’s exemplarism, I describe a distinctive, aesthetically-inflected mode of admiration called moral attraction whose object is the inner beauty of a person—the expression of the ‘inner’ virtues or excellences of character of a person in ‘outer’ forms of bodily comportment that are experienced, by others, as beautiful. I then argue that certain moral traditions deploy inner beauty within their practices of moral self-cultivation—a good example being Confucianism. Advocates of exemplarist moral education should therefore take seriously the ways that an aesthetics of exemplarity can play roles within projects of moral self-cultivation.

Intersubjectivity and engagement in Ku Waru

Abstract Following Evans et al. (2018a, 2018b), I use “engagement” to refer to grammatical encoding of the relative accessibility of an entity or state of affairs to the speaker and addressee. I refer to what is thereby encoded as the “engagement function”. How neatly does that function map on to grammatical categories of particular languages? Here I address that question with respect to the Papuan language Ku Waru, focusing on spatial and epistemic demonstratives, and definiteness and indefinite marking. I show that forms within each of those word/morpheme classes do serve engagement functions, but in cross-cutting and partial ways. I show how the engagement function is also achieved through poetic parallelism, prosody, gaze direction and other aspects of bodily comportment. In the examples considered, the engagement function is realised through interaction between those extra-linguistic features and the grammatical ones. The main thing that is added by grammatical engagement marking is an explicit signalling of the intersubjective accord that has been achieved on other bases. I hypothesize that that is true of engagement overall, and conclude by suggesting some ways to test that hypothesis and to advance the understanding of engagement more generally.

The state\u2019s sexual desires: the performance of sexuality in the Dutch asylum procedure

The facticity of sexuality is a key driver of the asylum procedure in “LGBT” cases, where non-heterosexual identities can be grounds for gaining” refugee status.” The procedure becomes a test of sexual veracity by means of a truthful performance. This performance is primarily discursive, but it is also bodily in terms of the way bodily comportment is considered indicative of a “true story.” Underlying this process is a conception of sexuality as a fixed, invisible but ever present identity. Sexuality, we argue, gets configured in ways akin to what is commonly called an “infrastructure.” The veracity and facticity of accounts of, and for, this ‘infrastructure of selfhood’ can only be ascertained in live encounters during the asylum procedure. This article ethnographically highlights how such a particular facticity is composed in the Dutch asylum procedures. Building on Judith Butler’s work on narrative accounts of the self, we show how the state intervenes in crucial ways in asserting the authority to assign truth to such a narrative account.

With Respect to Zulu: Revisiting ukuHlonipha

Hlonipho is a form of respectful behavior, widespread in southern Africa. Its linguistic manifestation has often been interpreted as a "traditional" verbal taboo, whereby married women must avoid uttering the father-in-law's name. The practice of (uku)hlonipha is not only verbal, however. Its fundamentally somatic meaning—covering, avoiding, and suppressing affect—applies broadly to bodily comportment, clothing, and the physical activity of speaking. The linguistic practice of (isi)hlonipha is itself somatic, we argue, in a Zulu ideology of language as voice. (Uku)hlonipha is best understood, we propose, in terms of a semiotic economy that contrasts it with another genre of honorification, the celebratory, exuberant, and expansive practice of (uku)bonga, praise-performance. Bonga is the inverse of hlonipha, and the two are joined in a broader sense of respect and honorific practice. These two genres have been discussed separately in the literature, which also largely assigns them to gendered domains: hlonipha to women and domestic settings, bonga to men and public settings. Combining ethnographic fieldwork with the historical archive, we show that the gender stereotyping—though interesting—overlooks important ways in which each practice can be, and historically has been, done by the other gender. Finally, we explore present-day mediations of voice via mobile phones and radio broadcasting. Hlonipha, broadly conceived as "respect," is part of "doing and being Zulu" in a multicultural and multilingual state, and offers resources for contemporary concerns with social identity. Countering narrow categorizations of performance forms and, equally, assumptions that segregate language from a material world, our discussion explores wider semiotic networks. Linguistic practices, we argue, are not only actions of the mind but also of the body; and language use binds together, differentiates, and enables its speakers.

What Is Enactment What Is Dissociation

The current discussion offers an alternative to the dissociative self-state model of enactment and dissociation, emphasizing implicit memory processes in bodily comportment and style of relating with others. By embedding the occurrence of enactments within the ongoing flow of nonlinear dyadic process, the focus shifts to the subtle back-and-forth between patient and analyst that leads to the emergence of new relational (i.e., procedural) skills within a therapeutic relationship that is self-organizing at more inclusive levels. Enactment is thus seen as an emergent property of the dyad.

Dance Musicalization: Proposing a choreomusicological approach to Hindi film song-and-dance sequences

How do dancing bodies influence the music composed for them? Does the gestural repertoire of the on-screen performer impact the musical performance of the playback singer? How might a focus on dance provide new models for theorizing the Hindi film song-and-dance sequence? Through a focus on the dancing body, this article calls for a reconsideration of the process of ‘song picturization,’ a term commonly used in the Bombay film industry to reference the practice of recording the song first and then “adding” visuals to it. Using the example of the dancer-actress, Vyjayanthimala, it argues that in the case of certain dancer-actors, a reverse process of ‘dance musicalization’ may be at work, where the performer’s dance vocabulary and bodily comportment precede and influence the song. A choreomusicological analysis accords equal importance to the ‘sounding body’ of the dancer-actor as to the bodies that produce the film’s music, leading to the conceptualization of film music as produced through a multi-bodied ‘choreo-musicking body.’

In search of the Solemn with Sri Lankan migrant priests

The declining number of religious vocations joining Catholic seminaries in Italy has encouraged some dioceses to hire migrant religious workers to compensate for the lack of clergy available for parish work. Although initially approached as a temporary solution, an unforeseen consequence of this policy has been the emergence of congenial relationships between migrant priests and Italian parishioners, who often describe their bond as deeply spiritual. This article examines the experiences of Sri Lankan priests who work in Italy, highlighting the distinct emphasis that they place on reaching out to the communities that they work with. Through fieldwork conducted in Sri Lanka and Italy, I analyse how South Asian priests use concepts such as devotion and sincerity to explain how their approach to the priesthood makes a ‘solemn’ difference that is celebrated by local parishioners. With an explicit focus on pastoral work, this form of Asian Catholicism emphasises the importance of bodily comportment, ceremonial poise and ritual dignity, capturing the yearnings of Catholic laities avid for devotional celebrations capable of re‐connecting them to the spiritually meaningful aspects of their faith. My work draws lines of connection between the historical, theological and pedagogical underpinnings of Sri Lankan Catholicism and the affective responses that South Asian priests elicit in Europe.

Somatic Security: Negotiating Appropriateness in Sexualized Interactions

This article analyzes how individuals use affect as a resource to negotiate judgments of appropriateness in situations where they or others feel sexualized. It draws from two years of participant observation at a sensual figure drawing session in an erotic arts club—where bodily exposure was heightened and social norms regarding sexualization were ambiguous—as well as in-depth interviews with the club’s artists, models, and owners. It argues that somatic security and somatic insecurity, individuals’ comfort or unease with how they perceive others to interact with their bodies through talk and bodily comportment, mediate sexualized interactions. Extending sociological studies of sexualization in interaction, it reveals that these affective states, which arise out of situational dynamics, form a foundation of comfort/unease toward others and assurance/shame with oneself. Individuals use these affective experiences to judge and justify future interactions as appropriate or inappropriate and develop relationships with others.

The Downward Motion of Jesus' Sweat and the Authenticity of Luke 22:43-44

Recurring debate over the authenticity of Luke 22:43-44 has subjected the verses to intense scrutiny. In addition to the unique vocabulary and Jesus' ἀγωνία, the blood and sweat metaphor/imagery is a usual locus of investigation. Missing from these studies on the blood and sweat, however, has been any interrogation of καταβαίνοντες, the one term describing the sweat's secretion and motion. Almost unanimously, translators and commentators have rendered the participle as "falling" even though this is inconsistent with Luke's own use of καταβαίνειν. I argue that the notion of sweat falling is incongruous across time and genre with Greek modes of discussing the emission and movement of sweat and similar bodily fluids. Instead of Jesus' sweat "falling," I argue that "coursing down" or "streaming down" best captures the idiom. Along with gaining translational accuracy and coherence with Lucan usage, I suggest that this description of Jesus' sweat accords with his bodily comportment (kneeling) in 22:41, a modest but previously unnoticed piece of internal evidence that may point toward the verses' authenticity.

The savage life of ruins: Resistant rhythms in a Bangkokian contact zone

AbstractThe present study analyzes the everyday rhythms of a ruin in Bangkok, where middle-class residents are in day-to-day contact with the disenfranchised—mostly migrants from northeast Thailand. I study the connections between ruined space, non-hegemonic mobility, the body, and everyday resistance. I do so by comparing and contrasting the bodily comportment of the disenfranchised with the middle class gaze over the ruin. The middle-class gaze is informed by Thai/global notions about what it means to be “civilized,” and it contains a primordial fear of “savagery”. The ruin is felt before it is thought. The fear of the ruin is a fear of ruination, in the sense of losing material wealth and sliding into the lower class. Natural, resistant rhythms emerge as a result of the body’s encounter with modernity.

(Hip) Throwing Like a Girl: Martial Arts and Norms of Feminine Body Comportment

Although women have long been participants in martial sports, norms of “proper” feminine comportment can interfere with their success. Iris Marion Young's “Throwing Like a Girl” argues that, in physical activities, many women experience an inhibited intentionality. I extend this idea and argue that norms of proper feminine comportment make it harder for women to conceptualize their bodies as standing in agential physical relationships to others' bodies. This hampers many women starting out in combat sports and needs to be accounted for in women's self-defense training.

Bodies at sea: travelling to Australia in the age of sail

AbstractThis article considers the bodily experience of being at sea in the age of sail. Using shipboard diaries written by eight passengers during the high period of free migration to the Australasian colonies, it argues that oceanic journeys disrupted and upended the land-based bodily practices being fashioned in nineteenth-century Britain. At sea, these mechanisms of bodily comportment were rendered fragile and unstable, leaving middle- and working-class bodies alike vulnerable and open to refashioning and reformation. In so doing, it points to the need for scholars to bring together land- and sea-based histories and to historicize and particularize oceanic spaces.

The Signature of the Moving Body: Agency and Embodied Education Ideologies of Dance Teachers

Through an ethnographic study of dance teachers in Israel, this article calls attention to the teaching body as an active social agent and introduces the concept of body signature. It examines the bodily comportment of three dance teachers, arguing for embodied education ideologies, and the ability of teachers to maneuver within these concepts and reshape them. The article provides a valuable lens through which to explore the dynamics of educating bodies and their sociocultural contexts.

Introduction: Gendering Faith—Arab Women and the Islamic Revival

IntroductionGendering Faith—Arab Women and the Islamic Revival Hilde Granås Kjøstvedt (bio) This special issue on Arab women and their engagement with the Islamic Revival represents the final output of a Palestinian-Norwegian research collaboration. Muslim women have been involved with the Islamic Revival—al-Sahwa al-Islamiyya—since its inception more than forty years ago. Simply put, the revival can be seen as a move to reverse the so-called Westernization approaches that were characteristic of many governments in the Muslim world from the earlier parts of the twentieth century onwards.1 The gendered expressions of this revival have manifested themselves in various ways—in the individual practices of pious women who adopt a certain style of dress and bodily comportment, hold or attend lectures in mosques, and study and teach religious texts as well as in increased female mobilization for and participation in religiously oriented social and political organizations. The main challenge for feminist and liberal researchers has been to reconcile feminist agency with women’s support for and participation in the Islamic Revival. Some hold that Muslim women have been subjected to patriarchy for so long that they have internalized the values and developed “false consciousnesses.”2 Poverty and lack of other venues for acceptable socializing push women to turn to religious groups for comfort, as an outlet for frustration and anxiety, or to seek broader social networks. Other theorists focus on women’s agency within structures of subordination and argue that Muslim women actively resist patriarchy by subverting hegemonic meanings of cultural practices and employing them for their own potentially emancipatory ends.3 In a study of Egyptian female participants and preachers in mosques in Cairo, Egypt, social anthropologist Saba Mahmood suggests a notion of agency that allows for women’s voluntary submission to religious norms, even when those norms entail submission to male domination.4 Mahmood argues that the mosque participants are active agents of women’s empowerment and change—a pious kind of empowerment that is situated in the context of an [End Page vii] Islamic society, and a change that moves in a different direction from the secular and modern one seen as a precondition for women’s emancipation. This does not necessarily mean that the change religious Muslim women seek is anti-modern. Social anthropologist Lara Deeb found that her interlocutors—pious Shia Muslim women in Beirut, Lebanon—advocated an alternative pious Islamic modernity.5 Deeb argues that this modernity is enacted in everyday life; women here play the most important role due to the visibility of their enactment (in particular in regard to dress code). The women were critical of Western modernity, where material progress had come at the expense of spiritual and moral progress and impacted more negatively on women than on men. Deeb’s informants agreed that women were sometimes treated badly in the name of Islam but saw this as a result of lack of modernity and spiritual progress. These debates on women’s agency and their involvement with the Islamic Revival have informed the research of this project. The research project that constitutes the origins of this special issue began as a Palestinian-Norwegian collaboration in 2010 and developed during a time of cautious optimism in the Arab world related to the events that became known as the Arab Spring. However, the roots of this collaboration can be traced back to 1995. It was then that Muwatin, the Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy, based in Ramallah on the West Bank, and the Christian Michelsen Institute (cmi) based in Bergen, Norway, started their work together.6 Muwatin was founded by a group of scholars and academics in 1992 and was the first research institution of its kind in the occupied Palestinian territories. The institution’s work is geared toward making a contribution to the process of democratic transformation in Palestinian society in particular and in Arab society in general. In order to do so, Muwatin works through research, publication, and education as well as through networking and activism. cmi, for its part, was founded in 1930 as the first private research institute in Norway and focuses on generating and communicating knowledge relevant for...

Work wisdom: Teaching former prisoners how to negotiate workplace interactions and perform a rehabilitated self

Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork at a community-based prisoner reentry program, this article investigates how staff members attempt to cultivate former prisoners’ cultural capital to mitigate stigma and facilitate interactions with employers. I call this curriculum work wisdom, which involves teaching clients how to (1) disclose discrediting information and communicate remorse; (2) tailor their style of dress, speech, and bodily comportment to avoid evoking negative stereotypes; (3) negotiate the tacit norms of workplace culture; and (4) remain confident and resilient in the face of rejection. Work wisdom provides former prisoners with the dramaturgical resources to perform dominant cultural scripts and practices in the short term as they undergo the longer-term process of reintegration. These findings illustrate how the cultivation of cultural capital begins by teaching superficial performances that can be internalized as durable dispositions over time. In the conclusion, I discuss the limitations of work wisdom.

Making Loud Bodies “Feminine”: A Feminist-Phenomenological Analysis of Obstetric Violence

Obstetric violence has been analyzed from various perspectives. Its psychological effects have been evaluated, and there have been several recent sociological and anthropological studies on the subject. But what I offer in this paper is a philosophical analysis of obstetric violence, particularly focused on how this violence is lived and experienced by women and why it is frequently described not only in terms of violence in general but specifically in terms of gender violence: as violence directed at women because they are women. For this purpose, I find feminist phenomenology most useful as a way to explain and account for the feelings that many victims of this violence experience and report, including feelings of embodied oppression, of the diminishment of self, of physical and emotional infantilization. I believe that the insights to be found in feminist phenomenology are crucial for explaining how and why this phenomenon is different in kind from other types of medical violence, objectification, and reification. Iris Marion Young’s description of feminine existence under patriarchy, as conformed by a perpetual oppressive “I cannot,” is at the center of my analysis. I argue that laboring bodies are at least potentially perceived as antithetical to the myth of femininity, undermining the feminine mode of bodily comportment under patriarchy and thereby seriously threatening the hegemonic powers. Violence, then, appears to be necessary in order to domesticate these bodies, to make them “feminine” again.

Thailand's Politics of Politeness: Qualities of a Gentleman and the Making of ‘Thai Manners’

Appropriate personal conduct has long been intrinsic to notions of Thai national identity. Thailand has an especially large corpus of didactic works on proper manners. Formerly, one of the major sources of ideas about bodily comportment was Theravada Buddhism. From the late nineteenth century, however, another genre of literature on manners began to appear, written to instruct students in the newly established modern education system about the personal qualities necessary for a career in the expanding royal bureaucracy. This article examines the most famous of these didactic texts, Qualities of a Gentleman, written by the prominent educational reformer Chaophraya Phrasadet Surentharathibodi (1867–1916). Largely as a result of this work, the royal official became the new exemplar of proper social behaviour in Thai society. With the conservative political turn and the restoration of the monarchy in the late 1950s, the work was revived, and the social etiquette it taught was reproduced as the model not only for government officials, but for Thai citizens generally.